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Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Scanning & Indexing: Family History Library Collection

DearREADERS,A friend, Maurice Marler, is director in the census indexing I volunteer to do at www.FamilySearchIndexing.orgMaurice spotted the following article concerning the phenomenal digitizing and indexing projects of material at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah.

[...]"Rich Running, also a project manager for the [LDS] church'sFamily History Department, is responsible for seeing that the church's genealogyrecords — more than 5 billion documents on 2 1/2 million rolls of microfilm and1 1/2 million microfiche — are scanned.

Not everything in the Granite Mountain vaults in Little CottonwoodCanyon can be scanned. The LDS Church got these records from a variety ofsources, some of which are archival companies that don't want their recordspublished.

Still, the vast majority of the church's documents are reproducible,and right now the church's software experts need to scan quickly, because theyhave a lot to scan. Dobson explains that the U.S. Library of Congress contains29 million books, and the LDS Church's records hold 132 times that much data.Dobson doesn't want to guess how many billions of names are on those 5 billiondocuments."